Metcalf is credited with proposing that the Griswold House dining room be studded with painted panels like those at the Hôtel Baudy in Giverny, France. A floral still life is not what one expects to see from the brush of Willard Metcalf. Indeed, this panel in the dining room (below) is the only known example of a still-life painting by this noted landscape artist.

It is one of three Metcalf panels installed as a group by 1908 in a prime spot in the dining room, set off from all others. A landscape is to the left of the bouquet, and a seascape is above them both. A fourth panel by Metcalf is installed diagonally across the dining  room.

Metcalf chose to present these cosmos casually, arranged without apparent care as to how each one might be shown to its best advantage. The off-center position of the vase and the asymmetry of the various white, pink, and gold blooms moves one’s eye about and keeps the bouquet from appearing static. Perhaps the flowers were selected from Miss Florence’s gardens behind the house which have been recently replanted. The white highlights on the glass bowl – a rather larger bowl than one might expect – as well as the sweeps of grays and tans tease that a reflection of the room might be discernable on its surface. An unusual artistic choice is that the bouquet rests on no table or ledge but appears to float against a background painted to look like wood. Metcalf’s friend Childe Hassam also “floated” a floral still life in a similar manner on one of his own dining room panels.

“We have,” Metcalf assured Miss Florence in a letter, “started to complete the panels that we brought down with us…we’ll have them done soon and shall forward them to you.” The edges of the panel are left unpainted suggesting that Metcalf knew the intended placement of the panel in the room and how much of the surface would have been covered with the wood strapping.

Birch Trees Beside a Lake (below) is thickly painted, strongly colored, and mostly made up of very short brushstrokes. The effect is a slight twittering of stiff autumn leaves, and there is more movement in the painting besides. The white slender birch trees insistently lead one’s eye from bottom to top. Broad bands of land, trees, and sky counteract that vertical thrust with a strong horizontality, and the stippling that represents leaves moves the eye all around. For this and one other panel, Metcalf chose to use his monogram signature which is a red M in a circle seemingly done with one continuous movement.

Metcalf made a similar study of birch trees and water while visiting his artist friend Frank Benson at North Haven, Maine, in late August and early September 1907. His painting of that same year, A Family of Birches (in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.), shows a group of birches still in their summer greens, with a river or lake beyond. Moreover, he had that same year painted a large work (36 inches square) called Trembling Leaves, which is referred to in his cashbook (and mentioned by an artist friend) but which has never surfaced. At least one Metcalf scholar theorizes that this dining room panel was either a study for Trembling Leaves or a replication of it. Metcalf said he thought he had painted Trembling Leaves in Old Lyme, but his friend Arthur Hoeber believed the site was East Boothbay Harbor, Maine.

The summer of 1907 had been a bitter one for the artist because Robert Nisbet, a fellow Old Lyme colonist, former student, and contributor of two panels to the dining room, had run off with Metcalf’s wife. With the help of such friends as the Bensons and Florence Griswold, Metcalf eventually pulled himself together and went on to become one of his era’s leading landscape painters.

While he continued to be in touch with Florence Griswold, Metcalf’s return to Old Lyme in the fall of 1907 was his last visit there. He never forgot that Old Lyme had given him the boost to his career that had made all the difference. May Night, his moonlit view of the Griswold House, painted in 1906, won a gold medal at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and was bought for its permanent collection. His career took off after that.

Twice the size of the landscape and the floral still life beneath it, this scene is a near twin to a painting Ebbing Tide, Version 2 (currently in the collection of the Farnsworth Museum in Rockport, Maine and pictured in the gallery below) that Metcalf did in Maine during the late summer of 1907 and gave to artist Frank Benson.

It is possible, then, to approximate a date for the panel. Metcalf arrived at the Griswold House for his third season on September 11, 1907, was there through at least October, and never stayed there again. He could have painted the panel in New York afterwards, but the panels that artists took to the city to work on in 1907 would have been finished by the following spring.

The panel has lighter colors than does Version 2, and there are more of them, as in the touches of violet, green, and gold in the water. The surf is also whiter on the panel. The rocky headland is less clearly defined, however, and Metcalf eliminated some small boats that were near the far shore in the easel painting. Both paintings are compelling portrayals of the meeting of land, sea, and sky that humans often sense as elemental and profound. (A painting of another island in Maine by Old Lyme artist Charles Ebert of Monhegan Headlands in the Museum’s collection is another variation on the theme.)

Poor Little Bloticelli (below) portrays Willard Metcalf’s 15-year-old student, Lois Wilcox, who had come to Old Lyme to study with him and with Frank DuMond. Hard at work in her no-nonsense painting outfit, she offers an interesting contrast to the fashionable lady of leisure portrayed by Alonzo Kimball on a panel nearby.

Metcalf may actually have thought well of Wilcox, for he painted her as a young woman who faced her canvas with confidence.

Perhaps he chose to do little more than hint at her features because he wanted to depict a type of woman artist rather than a particular woman. Noteworthy here are Metcalf’s treatment of light and shade, the many color tones, and the animated brushwork that together convey a sense of the energy this artist is putting into her work. Note the bits of orange color that seem to be dripping off the young lady’s brush or canvas like a sign of her zeal.

As a mere student she was not allowed to stay in the house, but it would surely not have surprised her. Women were studying art in large numbers in the late 19th century, but professional artists generally regarded all art students and amateurs as annoying “blots.” Women students were especially troublesome because there were suddenly so many of them and because it was assumed their “careers” would end when they married. Many male art teachers had no qualms about charging women more than men and teaching them less. Lois Wilcox, however, already knew about artists and art colonies. She had grown up in Tryon, North Carolina, where an art colony had developed in the 1890s. She was an active member.

Lois Wilcox went on to have an active career, juggling roles as a painter, lithographer, cartoonist, craftsperson, teacher, and writer. She continued her studies at the Boston Museum School with Philip Hale and studied privately with Charles Hawthorne. In 1913 she had a solo exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts. In the 1920s she exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art and studied with Galemberti and Venturini-Papari in Italy. (There she probably saw Sandro Botticelli’s – the source for the pun Bloticelli – famous Venus, painted in about 1485.) She also participated in many national exhibitions of lithography, including Fifty Prints of the Year in 1939. From 1933 to 1946 she taught drawing and painting at Sweetbriar College in Virginia. She also excelled at bridge, acting, singing, playing piano, and public speaking. Not bad for a blot.

“The artists had long considered her one of the most objectionable ‘Blots’ among the numerous would-be-landscapists that came to Old [Lyme] every summer. A ‘Blot’ was the term used by professional artists to designate a female art student, the word being derived from the fact that the female art student is usually such a slovenly creature that she forms but a blot upon the landscape,” wrote artist and author Arthur Heming in the unpublished novel The Lions in the Lady’s Den, c. 1920s.